Category Archives: Backup

Tarsnap is an advanced online-backup facility, entirely encrypted. The only copy of the keys used to encrypt and decrypt archives are in your own possession, so things that should be kept safe, are (in the current form) safe. Tarsnap makes extensive use of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for storage.

Tarsnap is originally written by the FreeBSD Security Officer Emiritus’ Colin Percival, on topics that he periodic gives talks about at various conferences. If you are able, you should seriously attend one of those talks

Tim backups his data via Tarsnap, all via the same way. That works well for him, but for our hosting company that is more tricky. We do not want to keep large amounts of data for our customers (which tend to change rapidly, for example emails that come in and go out and get deleted etc.). Instead we want to keep the minimal amount of data for these customers, and we want to offer them more advanced backup strategies for which we calculate an increased price (the minimal backup strategy is free).

After collaborating, we decided that next to the free strategy, we would like to offer a medium-term backup strategy, and a maximum-term backup strategy, where the former is a month of backups (7 weekdays, 4 weeks), and the latter is three months of backups (7 weekdays, 4 weeks, 3 months), so that going back in time is doable. If customers want to have a customized strategy, that would ofcourse be possible if we add that to the script.

Since we are keen on open source we would like to offer you the option to download the script, and if possible even enhance it more so that we can all benefit from it. Do note that we didn’t try to complicate the script, but instead keeping it as simple as possible. That means that we add more lines then likely needed, but it is very readable. One comment from Colin we got so far is that Tarsnap is capable of removing more files in one go (tarsnap -d -f -f ) and that is not yet implemented in the script. We will consider doing so.. ofcourse